Editorial–The uphill battle on HD voice interconnection

One of the two panels I moderated in Austin, TX last week was on migrating interconnections between TDM and IP to IMS (peering), but the real eye opener was talking to some of the hosted VoIP service providers on the show floor. Most of them didn’t know who Neutral Tandem or XConnect were and one… well… let’s hold that for a moment.

And there was the one-in-five encounter with a hosted provider which saw no need in running G.722 on their Polycom end-points. G.711 or G.729 were perfectly fine codecs.

Yah, great way to show off high-quality IP phones and beat your competitors.

Anyway, I suspect some of the bigger boys – OK, maybe Sprint – might get moving on HD voice interconnect now that Neutral Tandem has gone public with its interconnection strategy.

If roughly four out of five service providers are interested in moving out of an HD voice “island” to a larger cloud, then there’s some hope after all, but I suspect Neutral Tandem and XConnect need to light a fire under their marketing and sales people to get the world out.